The official number 58,148 Americans killed during service. An additional 114 were captured and died in captivity.

In the 5 years following the war, the suicide rate of veterans was 1.7 times the non-Veteran population — 9,000 suicides as a direct result of the war.

There were 223,748 South Vietnamese soldiers killed, as well as 5,282 of other nationalities.

According to the Agence France Presse (French Press Agency), “. . .the true civilian casualties of the Vietnam War were 2,000,000 in the north, and 2,000,000 in the south.

Military casualties were 1.1 million killed and 600,000 wounded in 21 years of war. These figures were deliberately falsified during the war by the North Vietnamese

Communists to avoid demoralizing the population.”

So approximately 5.3 million total Vietnamese casualties from 1954 to the Fall of Saigon, April 30th 1975.

Henry Kissinger helped to orchestrate indiscriminate B-52 bombing raids that killed hundreds of thousands of people. As national security adviser (NSA) to President Nixon from 1969-73, and later as US secretary of state from 1973-77, Kissinger was the chief planner of US war policy in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

A US Senate sub-committee on refugees claims from March 1968 to March 1972 more than three million civilians were killed, wounded or made homeless because of Kissinger’s ruthless political and military maneuvers.

“During this same period, most of which coincides with Kissinger’s role as NSA to the President, the US dropped nearly 4.5 million tons of high explosive on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia – more than double the tonnage dropped during the whole of the second world war,” writes Peter Tatchell of the Guardian Unlimited.

No smart bomb technology, just shock and awe and more shock as US bombing of civilian and military targets – there wasn’t much the Air Force command did to verify what their bombers were hitting — killed 350,000 civilians in Laos and 600,000 in Cambodia. Multiple that total by three or more for the number of civilians who were wounded and made refugees.

“During the first 30 months of the Nixon-Kissinger administration, the US counter-insurgency Phoenix Program was responsible for the murder or abduction of 35,708 Vietnamese civilians,” Tatchell adds.

Million of gallons of toxic spray in a campaign of ecocide by the US saturated Vietnam in chemical defoliants and pesticides, including Agent Orange. Birth defects and large swaths of land in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia have been rendered useless for farming or human life.

In 2005 PCB levels (found in agent orange) in lactating women’s milk are four to 16 times higher than our own EPA deems as moderately unsafe.

Paul Kirk has been a journalist since 1977. He's covered police, environment, planning and zoning, county and city politics, as well as working in true small town/community journalism situations in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Mexico and beyond. He's been a part-time faculty since 1983, and as such has worked in prisons, gang-influenced programs, universities, colleges, alternative high schools, language schools, as a private contractor-writing instructor for US military in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Washington. Read other articles by Paul.

This article was posted on Saturday, April 13th, 2013 at 7:49am and is filed under Poetry.